Thursday, August 28, 2008

Hack Week III: Tomboy Joins The Dark Side

Tomboy on Windows Where It Belongs

As you all know, my job here at Novell is to migrate all worthwhile desktop Linux applications off of that ridiculous platform and onto Windows so that we can do away with this nasty open source stuff. Unfortunately I haven't yet gotten the paper work to close up my code for the latest victim of this effort, so for now dirty open source hippies can get it here:

And here's an image of what it looks like. Windows has a really awesome feature where you can press your "Print Screen" button, and then you dig around in the menus to find the excellent Microsoft Paint application, at which point you recall that you can produce a "screen shot" by "pasting". Then you save in one of a myriad of excellent file formats, and you have an image of what you were doing on your computer! You can then share it with your friends like so:

What do you think? Excited to end the Linux charade and switch to a solid and hip platform like Vista? Woo!

I feel very silly today.

Utah Open Source Conference

I was fortunate enough to get to join my friends and coworkers in Provo for this Hack Week. I normally work from my home office, so I'm having a blast seeing everybody. Today we're working at Salt Lake Community College as part of the Utah Open Source Conference. I'm actually talking with my buddy Brian Merrell about the efforts of the Mono a11y team (you know, my actual job). It should be fun, we've got some neat slides and we are both cool people so I don't really see what could go wrong. The UTOSC team has done a ridiculously awesome job setting up this conference, so I'm really excited to see everything come to fruition. We had a sweet speaker dinner last night but moron that I am I forgot my camera so you just have to take my word for it!

This Tomboy stuff still needs a bit of work so off I go. Hopefully having Tomboy run on more platforms will help us attract more users and developers. I know it's a popular request so I'm pretty serious about getting it supported in trunk. Later guys!

@elephantum: It uses GTK# on Windows, and when it runs on Mac, it will use GTK# there. Tomboy is mostly UI and code that deals specifically with the GtkTextView. Splitting it up is basically writing an entirely new application, and I have no interest in doing that. I'd be happy to help support others who wanted to make an app on another platform compatible with Tomboy notes, though.

@canny: I don't feel comfortable doing wide distribution of Tomboy Windows binaries until most add-ins are ready and more testing has occurred. The potential for note data loss is too large. Anybody can download SharpDevelop for free and build it, and if you follow tomboy-list you may find helpful surprises there, too.

When I have binaries (hopefully an installer) available, I will blog...but I feel that even with a disclaimer it is not OK to put out something that could eat your notes!